For specific advice on a high quality lifetime diet, see the article on the Goddess diet plan.

    A vegetarian diet is one the exclusively includes food from plants and completely excludes foods from animals.

    Vegan is different than vegetarian because it is a complete lifestyle of avoiding all animal products (including leather and furs), not just avoiding animal foods (avoiding eggs, dairy, gelatin, and honey).

    A semi-vegetarian diet is one the mostly includes food from plants and excludes most foods from animals, but allows fish, seafood, insects (including honey), eggs, cheese, milk, and other dairy products (and often allows gelatin as well).

    A lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet is one the mostly includes food from plants and excludes most foods from animals, but allows eggs, cheese, milk, and other dairy products (and often allows honey and gelatin as well).

    A lacto-vegetarian diet is one the mostly includes food from plants and excludes most foods from animals, but allows cheese, milk, and other dairy products (and often allows honey and gelatin as well, but excludes eggs).

    In July 2009, after an exhaustive study review, the American Dietetic Association concluded that well-planned vegetarian diets are safe for all people at every stage of life, including pregnant women, nursing mothers, babies, children, teenagers, adults, and seniors.

    The American Dietetic Association emphasizzed that a meat-free meal plan may lower rates of obesity, Type 2 adult onset diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers.

    The American Civil Liberties union (ACLU) obtained documents in March 2006 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Denver office that showed that FBI agents spied on American citizens who gave vegetarian meals to the poor. FBI spokespersons defended the surveillance of vegans as part of the war against terrorism.

    “Vegetarians may need as much as 50% more zinc than non-vegetarians because of the lower absorption of zinc from plant foods, so it is very important for vegetarians to include good sounces of zinc in their diet”, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

    “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.”, Henry David Thoreau.

    “I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.”, Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi.

    “Oh, my fellow men, do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.”, Pythagoras (Greek mathematician). Pythagoras ate bread and honey for breakfast and raw vegetables for supper. He also paid fishermen to throw their catch back into the sea.

    “Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstinence from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of mind the first man touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, set forth tables of dead, stale bodies, and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? It is certainly not lions or wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us. For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being. … If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you wnt to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax.”, Plutarch (Roman historian).

    “It may indeed be doubted whether butchers’ meat is anywhere a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet. Decency nowhere requires that any man should eat butchers’ meat.”, Adam Smith (British economist).

See also the Goddess diet plan.

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